Two elements anchored the orientation: a hands-on AI session conducted identically across all four campuses and a guest programme featuring senior industry practitioners, organised city by city. Students at every campus began their degree after completing the same practical work with the same tools during the same week.
The hands-on session was led by Priteesh Joshi, Associate Director, AI Learning, Stride School of Business. Students worked with NotebookLM, Gamma and Gemini Canvas to research a topic and transform the output into images, mind maps, a video, a podcast and a set of quizzes. They then faced a practical test by building a presentation on the same brief across Claude, Gemini and Gamma, presenting it to the class and discussing which tool was suited to which task.
At the Delhi NCR campus, students also built a working website during the session. In Jaipur, students built an app and then shot, edited and presented vlogs about their first days at the school. Priteesh Joshi also took each batch through the three-year academic plan, explaining what each year covers and how AI is integrated throughout the programme.
The guest programme was conducted separately across the four campuses. At Delhi NCR, Mayank Agarwal, VP/Head of Marketing at The Man Company, a part of Emami Group, participated in a fireside conversation on building a D2C brand from scratch, including the aspects of brand-building that AI has already taken over. Aditya Malhotra, DGM Product at Airtel Digital, conducted a masterclass on how product teams decide whether to pursue or abandon an idea.
At Pune, the fireside conversation, “The Face of Business and Entrepreneurship Changing with the Evolution of AI,” featured Sudarshan Mahabal, AI and Technology Leader at Xoriant, and Prayag Dwivedi, Community Manager at Emergent. Girish Chhabra, VP and Global Practice Head for Data and AI at Atos, led a masterclass on agentic AI and gave students an assignment to complete afterward. Jayesh Atal, Strategy, Marketing and Operations at KPIT, explained why AI will not replace them and walked students through the practical reasoning behind that view.
Bangalore brought together Aastha Shree, Vice President at Goldman Sachs, and Laveena Lobo, Partner at Insist Consulting, for a fireside chat on AI, careers, leadership and the changing nature of work in a world of AI. Uttaran Nayak, Co-Founder & CEO of Alchemyst AI, led a masterclass focused on the question, “What does a business look like when AI is built into everything?” Gaurav Ranjan, Principal at Prime Venture Partners, joined a fireside chat on entrepreneurship and why investors and venture capital matter to companies that students may one day build.
At Jaipur, Radhesh Sirohiya, Co-Founder of Shyle, joined a fireside conversation on entrepreneurship and e-commerce, answering questions about the practical challenges involved in building a business.
The four campuses are located at HiTech Group of Institutions in Delhi NCR, Rathinam School of Business in Bangalore, Ajeenkya DY Patil University in Pune and Jagannath University in Jaipur. Students earn their BBA from the partner institution at each campus, while the programme, curriculum and learning model belong to Stride School of Business.
Every student received a personal Apple MacBook in their welcome kit on the first day. Each campus has an identical set of spaces comprising the AI Launchpad, Collab Zone, Podcast Studio, Pitch Tank, AI Forum and Smart Classrooms, which are used for classes, project work, presentations and collaboration.
Piyush Nangru, Founder, Stride School of Business, said, “A school’s first batch usually takes years to build. Ours came together in four cities at the same time, around a straightforward argument: business education should now be taught with AI inside the work, not alongside it. The appetite for that has moved faster than the sector has. ASCENT ’26 was built to match it, which is why the same programme ran in all four cities in the same week rather than as four separate welcomes.”
Anmol Jain, Founding Director, Stride School of Business, said, “We could have spent three days telling this batch what Stride School of Business is. We decided to show them instead. They sat with people whose own jobs are being changed by AI and then we put them in front of the same tools and asked them to make something. By the third day every student had built something of their own. For a first batch, in a first week, that is exactly the beginning we wanted them to have.”
With ASCENT ’26 concluded, the Class of 2029 begins its three-year programme with AI running alongside business fundamentals, practical projects and industry exposure. The model places AI within how students learn concepts, develop ideas and solve problems rather than treating it as a separate layer of the programme.
About Stride School of Business
Stride School of Business is an AI-first undergraduate business school with campuses in Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Pune and Jaipur. Its three-year programme is built around a learning-by-doing model combining business fundamentals, AI, practical projects and industry exposure. Students earn an AICTE-approved and UGC-recognised BBA degree from the partner institution at their campus.
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